Neighborhood Celebration: Check out the Confucius Institute participating schools

We’re getting really excited about Saturday’s Neighborhood Celebration at Maynard H. Jackson High School (1 p.m.-4 p.m.), which will showcase the southeast Atlanta schools in APS. We’ve spent the past couple weeks offering glimpses at what these participating schools have to offer our students, and it’s a pretty diverse array. But particularly special is the schools that participate in the Confucius Institute, which supports the instruction of Chinese language (Mandarin, in this case) and culture in the schools.

The Confucius Institute in Atlanta opened its doors at Coan Middle School in March 2008, marking an unprecedented public- private- international partnership among Atlanta Public Schools, Emory University and Nanjing University in China. It is the only Confucius Institute in the world that is an alliance between a K-12 institution and institutions of higher learning. (Read more here.) Other participating schools include Toomer Elementary and Neighborhood Celebration host school Jackson High. In fact, students from Toomer Elementary will provide a performance at the Neighborhood Celebration — one of several scheduled. (We’ll have the complete schedule soon.)

Check out some of our previous coverage of the Confucius Institute here and here.